Getting to Good Enough

Evening routines set you up for success the next day. Shannon has a well-practiced evening routine she thinks of as "putting the house to bed." In this episode, Shannon and Janine discuss the value of evening routines and how they can make your life easier.

Discussion topics include:

• Shannon's ease-filled evening routine

• How putting her house to bed gives

• Shannon peace of mind

• Janine’s end-of-the-workday routine

• How evening routines can make your mornings easier

• Ideas for things you can do in the evening to make your mornings less hectic

• Thinking of evening routines as doing a favor for your future self

Being overcommitted often means being stressed. In this episode, Janine and Shannon suggest the hazards of overcommitting and ways to keep yourself from overcommitting. (Including ways to just say no.) They also discuss the value of building a buffer into your life.

Discussion topics include:

• How Janine lived an overcommitted life for a few stressful years

• Tips for responding to invitations to help

• How to create that all-important buffer

• How overcommitting contributed to Shannon’s chronic lateness problem (and how she overcame it)

• The overcommitment antidote: How to figure out how much free time you have available so you can avoid overcommitting

• How to evaluate whether you should say yes (or no) to a commitment

Virtually everyone procrastinates at one time or another. In fact, both Shannon and Janine used to be terrible procrastinators. In this episode we take a look at the various reasons people procrastinate and offer up some strategies for overcoming procrastination.

Discussion topics include:

• How procrastination differs from waiting or postponing

• The four productivity blocks (i.e. reasons you procrastinate) that Shannon has identified

• Strategies for overcoming each of these productivity blocks

• How to learn what your particular productivity block is

• How fear fits into the procrastination picture

• A productivity hack for those who have a tendency to put off making appointments

• A debate over the historic length of Shannon's hair

The routine things we do every morning can help shape our day. Janine is the queen of morning routines while Shannon strives for a better one. In this episode Shanon and Janine discuss the hows and whys of building a strong morning routine.

Discussion topics include:

• Janine’s very established morning routine

• How Shannon's kitten, Cleo, is helping her create a new morning routine

• Linking new habits to old habits to create a routine

• Deciding what to put in your morning routine (hint: start small and easy)

• Why morning routines are so important

• Janine and Shannon’s outrageously helpful dishwasher routine

• How Shannon is planning to create a better morning routine

Janine and Shannon have decided that each episode that ends in a zero will be a Good Enough In Practice {GEIP} episode, where we talk about something that demonstrates how embracing good enough is helping (or could help) one of us.

This week, Janine talks about the knitted Brain Hat she started making for a friend to wear in the March for Science in April 2017. Perfectionism took over and she stopped working on it. This bright pink hat sat in her dining room on a styrofoam head for nearly a year and a half until, prompted by the podcast, she decided to try to get past the perfectionism and finish the damn hat.

Discussion topics include:

• How perfectionism got in the way of her finishing the brain hat (a brain surgeon was involved)

• How working on it a little at a time made finishing the hat feel doable

• How recognizing what was important about the project helped her finish it

• How Shannon’s anti-procrastination quiz helped her (and can help you) identify her productivity block

Shannon put on her coaching hat and helped Janine shift her perspective so she could finish the hat.

Comment from Janine: Guess what? It worked! I finished the hat and delivered it to the recipient, Lucinda. She loved it. She even texted that her husband was impressed with it! 

Be sure and check out the show notes on the website for photos.

Shannon and Janine discuss luck -- the good kind -- and how a "good enough" attitude can help make you more aware and able to take  advantage of opportunities that show themselves. We also talk about ways you can improve your luck.

Discussion topics include:

• The Incredibles

• Janine's mother's funeral (both of which are relevant to the topic!)

• The importance of being willing to fail

• How anxiety around perfectionism can make you unlucky

• Luck school (raise your hand if you want Shannon to offer luck workshops!)

• Figuring out how go about being prepared so that you can be lucky

We all do things differently--and that's okay. In this episode Shannon and Janine talk about how it doesn't matter how you do things, as long as your way is working.

Discussion topics include:

• Why comparing yourself to others isn't helpful

• How it's your own standards (not your mother's or the media's) that matter

• Dispelling some myths about professional organizers and life coaches

• "Faking it until you make it" (or not)

• Janine's freak out when she invited a group of professional organizers to her home

Please note: We had some technical difficulties with this episode, which was originally supposed to be Episode 5. It kicked our butts. As a result, you might notice a few sound problems. But we liked the content so we embraced good enough and published it. We hope you enjoy it enough to overlook the sound issues.

It's hard to know how to stop at good enough if you haven't identified what good enough means to you. Shannon and Janine discuss why it's important to understand your own standards of good enough--and how those standards are very personal.

Discussion topics include:

• How standards can vary depending on the importance of what you’re working on

•How living with teenagers has caused Shannon to embrace a different standard of good enough in terms of housekeeping (spoiler alert: the word “botulism” is part of her standard)

• The challenge of living with people whose standards of clutter are different than yours

• Shannon’s technique for avoiding over-researching purchases

•How Janine straddles the divide between the future and the ancient ways

Shannon and Janine get excited talking about task management and the various methods we've used over the years to stay happy and productive while trying to get stuff done.

Discussion topics include:

• Mark Forster's task management systems

• Todoist, which we're both customizing to our needs

• The importance of writing down tasks

• Using Post-it® Notes to keep track of tasks

• The value of shaking up your system

* To-do List Bingo

Janine and Shannon truly embraced the concept of "good enough" when creating this podcast.

In this episode we talk about how we went from idea to launch in less than two months (with five episodes recorded!). It's been a great lesson for us on the value of letting go of perfectionism.

We let it be easy when it came to:

• Choosing the podcasting app we use to produce the podcast

• Selecting topics

• Selecting the name of the podcast

• Deciding what had to be in place before we could launch

• Creating a logo for the podcast

• Rehearsing our conversations (or not)

Listen to the inside scoop on how putting "good enough" into practice allowed us to make creating a podcast fun and easy!